45 years: 1978-2023
On an average day in America, seven children and teens will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America, Guardian editor-at-large, Gary Younge, tells the stories of the lives lost during a single day. It could have been any day, but he picked 23 November 2013. Black, white and Latino, aged 9 to 19, they fell at sleepovers, on street corners, in stairwells and on their own doorsteps, from the rural midwest to the barrios of Texas.
None of these stories reached the national news. Gary spent 18 months investigating the lives and death of these ten young people, to reveal the full human stories behind the statistics and the brief mentions in local papers to discover what they might tell us about America at large. Raising crucial questions about race, class, youth and parenting, Gary puts a child’s face on the “collateral damage” of gun violence in America and asks how these shootings have become a banal fact of death. While mass shootings like Sandy Hook cause national outrage, why do these everyday individual deaths barely register in the national consciousness? And what is it about the political culture that makes those in power incapable of achieving gun law reform?
Gary Younge lived in the USA for twelve years as a correspondent for the Guardian, and returned to the UK in 2015.
Interested in learning more about Newham Bookshop and some of the people connected with it? We have four lessons for classroom or family use developed from On the Record’s oral history project centered around Newham Bookshop, Writing and Reading Newham. Click here for full details.
We are proud that Newham Bookshop is LoveReading’s Bookshop of the Month. The article features a Q&A with Vivian Archer, which you can read here.
